Metro Chabacano (1991)
Javier Alvarez

    Of all of the Mexican composers currently active today, Álvarez has been the most widely recognized internationally. Most of this prolific composer’s works are characterized by a harmonious balance between his understanding of the medium for which he writes and a profound technical mastery of his musical language. In composer John Adams’ words, “the music of Javier Álvarez reveals popular culture influences that go beyond our boundaries of time and space.”
    Javier Álvarez lives in Mérida (México) and is director of the music department of the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán.  From 1982 until 2005 he lived in London, where he was a professor at the Royal College of Music and at the Guildhall School of Music in London, teaching composition and technology. He has composed large scale-works such as Mambo, an opera which combines the use of singers, instrumentalists and computers, for the Nexus Opera in London (premiered in 1991).  About Metro Chabacano, the composer writes:
     “The seminal idea for Metro Chabacano came from an earlier piece for string orchestra, Canción de Tierra y Esperanza, which I had given my parents as a Christmas gift in 1986. Having heard a demo recording of that piece, my friends from the Cuarteto Latinoamericano insisted that I should do a version for string quartet. But since none of us had a particular occasion in mind, the idea was somehow abandoned for a few years. In 1990, the sculptor Marcos Limenez approached me with the idea of using Canción . . . to accompany one of his astonishing kinetic installations. This was to be displayed in Mexico City’s—and the world’s—biggest and busiest subway station, Metro Chabacano. This provided the perfect motivation to revise the piece for the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, who gave the first performance there in 1991 as part of the inaugural ceremonies for the installation. The piece was subsequently performed on tape there for a period of three months.” Metro Chabacano has a continuous eighth-note movement of moderately driving speed from which short melodic solos emerge from each instrument. The repeated notes give a false sense of simplicity: although the piece is brief and in a single movement, the rhythms, accents and melodic fragments that emerge from the motto perpetuo background are intricately playful.
Additional notes by Daniel Vega-Albela


String Quartet in G Major, Op. 77, No. 1
Franz Joseph Haydn

    This quartet was the first of a projected set of six commissioned from Haydn in 1799 by Prince Lobkowitz, the fine amateur violinist also known for his patronage of Beethoven. Only two of the set were ever written, however—they were in fact the last complete string quartets the 67-year old Haydn was to write.
    Most biographers attribute Haydn’s abandonment of the project to his becoming involved in writing his massive oratorio The Creation, but  there is also a theory that Haydn simply decided to leave the field to Beethoven, whose opus 18 quartets—also commissioned by Lobkowitz—came out at the same time and were much more favorably received.
    Listening to Haydn’s splendid piece, however, it is hard to imagine him being wary of comparisons with anyone, even the young Beethoven. The first movement sets a confident tone with a jaunty, march-like melody over a steady rhythmic pulse that dominates the whole movement, with only occasional brief digressions in a more lyrical vein. The theme is often embellished by little side comments from supporting instruments, and much delightful decorative figuration from the first violin.
    The slow movement discloses a grave, hymn-like theme, beginning in stark octaves, and developing a mood that might be called intense reverie. There is a brief middle section devoted mainly to exposition and decoration of this theme. The movement is remarkable for the intensity of its emotional expression—a surprise for those listeners who think of Haydn only as a purveyor of light entertainment music.
    The third movement is marked menuetto, but one is advised not to try dancing to it. It is really a true scherzo, full of energy and high spirits. The trio section has flashes of mock-drama, and the quiet close is amusing. The vigorous finale is entirely devoted to repetition and development of the perky dance-tune stated at the outset.
Program Notes by Robert Finn

Cuarteto Virreynal
Miguel Bernal Jiménez

    Miguel Bernal Jimenez was born in Morelia, the capitol of Michoacán. Between 1928 and 1933, Jim6nez worked in the Pontifical Institute for Sacred Music of the Vatican. There he earned a Masters degree in composition and organ, then a doctorate in Gregorian chant. He returned to Mexico, where his activities included teaching, choral conducting, work as organ soloist, musicologist, researcher in native Mexican Music and composer. At time of his death, he served as director of the School of Music of the University of New Orleans.
    Cuarteto Virreynal (meaning “Viceregal”) is based on Mexican children’s songs. In the quartet, Jimenez pays his respects to the Italian style so popular in Spain and Latin-America during the classical period.
 

Quartet No.4 "Música de Feria"
Silvestre Revueltas

    Silvestre Revueltas is one of the most startlingly individual and original composers of Latin America. His life history reads like a screenplay awaiting production. He studied in his native Mexico, Chicago's American Conservatory and New York and conducted theater orchestras in Texas and Alabama, returning to be assistant conductor of Mexico City Symphony Orchestra in 1929, beside Carlos Chavez, with whom he co-founded a series of chamber music programs devoted to new music (appearing frequently as violinist, with Chávez as pianist).
    With almost no training in composition, Revueltas dove into the field, much encouraged by Chávez. During the 1930s, he produced a string of orchestral works. Along with these came seven film scores, two string quartets and two ballets, plus songs and solo piano works. Besides his work as conductor, composer and violinist, Revueltas also served as promoter of cultural affairs for Spain's Loyalist Government during the Spanish Revolution. Indeed, the Symphonic Suite from his film “Redes” and his “Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca” were both premiered in Spain during 1937. He returned to Mexico, his health in ruins, and died in Mexico City, at age 40.
    Revueltas is considered to be somewhat of a nationalist composer (despite the fact that he himself did not care to label himself as such), having made extensive use of melodic and rhythmic ideas taken directly from the folk and native music of Mexico. At the same time, he used his knowledge of European harmony and orchestration (he was heavily influenced by the music of Ravel and Stravinsky) to create an unmistakable palette of colors and musical ideas.
    Musica de Feria, or Music of the Fair, is Revueltas' fourth and last string quartet. It is a very visual, one-movement work which depicts a typically Mexican scene at a fair. Using bitonality and polyrhythms, Revueltas creates a very complex four-voice texture in which one can easily imagine oneself walking through the plaza of a small town in Mexico during a fiesta: three or four Mariachi bands playing at the same time, hoping to attract the richest customers; merchants selling their wares; fireworks, carnival rides and maybe even a few drunks enjoying the festivities. In the middle of the quartet, we witness an almost surreal, quiet intermezzo, where the composer hints at the traditional tune, Cocula, only to reawaken us in the middle of the fair for a brilliant, almost frantic finale.


String Quartet No.14 in D minor, D.810 "Death and the Maiden"
Franz Schubert

    Following a flurry of activity as a composer of string quartets at the tender age of sixteen, Schubert wrote only three further quartets during his period of apprenticeship—one in each of the succeeding three years. After this there was a long hiatus, broken only by an attempt, at the end of 1820, to write a quartet in C minor. (Its opening movement, the only portion of the work Schubert completed, is familiarly known as the Quartettsatz, or “Quartet Movement”) By the time Schubert returned to the medium of the string quartet, in the spring of 1824, he was writing not for the family drawing room, but for the concert hall. At the same time, the world of his youth had been irretrievably lost to him, and a marked change had come over his music. The previous year he had felt the first symptoms of syphilis, and had been forced to write several of the songs in his cycle of rejected love, “Die schöne Müllerin,” during a protracted hospital stay.
    With Schubert’s acute awareness of his own mortality came a new-found determination to make a bid for posterity. He wrote, “I have composed 2 quartets for violins, viola & violoncello, and intend to write another quartet. Altogether, in this way I intend to pave the way towards the grand symphony. The latest in Vienna is that Beethoven is giving a concert in which he is having his new symphony [No 9], three movements from the new Mass and a new overture [Die Weihe des Hauses] performed. God willing, I am also thinking of giving a similar concert in the coming year.”
    Just how lofty Schubert’s aspirations were is shown by the fact that he dedicated his new quartets to the famous violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the leader of a string quartet closely associated with Beethoven’s works. Nor can it be coincidental that the following year the first of Schubert’s published piano sonatas appeared with a dedication to Beethoven’s staunchest patron, Archduke Rudolph of Austria.
    Schubert's D minor String Quartet, composed in 1824, begins with a triplet-rhythm motive. This opening motive is whipped into a considerable frenzy before the music quiets, pauses on two chords surrounded by silence, and then launches into the subsidiary subject, a lilting violin duet of contrasting lyrical quality. The development section is a compact and closely worked contrapuntal elaboration of the second theme. A rising wave of expressive tension leads without pause to the recapitulation.
    The work's title—"Death and the Maiden"—derives from the source of the theme of its second movement, a song that Schubert composed on a poem of that title by Matthias Claudius. The song, with its subject of youthful mortality, is one that must have given Schubert pause for thought. It begins with a soft introduction depicting the solemn tread of death, continues with the maiden's music of panic and fear, and ends with the words of death set to the strains of the introduction. It is from the opening and closing sections of the song that Schubert borrowed the theme for the third movement, which he worked as a set of five variations, with coda The Scherzo, with its unsettling rhythmic syncopations and restless expression, reinstates the defiant mood of the first movement. Its main theme is bursting with tension and barely contained energy. The finale, a feverish tarantella, combines formal elements of rondo and sonata. His model is likely to have been the last movement of Beethoven’s famous “Kreutzer” Sonata, and there are passages in the two works that are remarkably similar.